Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer aided remote storage auditing.
Background Art
The demand for data storage continues to increase. The need for accessibility of data from multiple locations across the internet also continues to increase. Therefore, the ability to store and access data remotely is increasingly important in a variety of applications. One solution is to provide large storage at one or more central locations. Centralized storage, however, requires infrastructure that can support high bandwidth and large storage capacity. Such infrastructure is costly. Another solution is a distributed approach where computer systems having storage are coupled across one or more networks. In the absence of a central manager it can be difficult to use storage efficiently. For instance, with such networked systems, individual computer systems may have storage that goes unused. Peer-to-peer storage architectures have been developed to use this available storage to lower the bandwidth and storage costs to central managers. Peer-to-peer systems however, are difficult to manage and audit. For example, some users may attempt to cheat the system by discarding data after initial storage. Consequently, in peer-to-peer systems it is difficult to ensure that data is properly being stored.
What is needed is improved auditing of remote storage.